The No. 65 Minnesota women's tennis team, coming off a 16-8 regular season with a 6-5 mark in Big Ten play, will play Wisconsin at 2 p.m. Thursday in Evanston, Ill. in the Big Ten Tournament. The Gophers come in as the No. 5 seed after posting their highest conference win total in over a decade and will take on the No. 11 seeded Badgers. The winner will face No. 3 Ohio State in the tournament quartfinals Friday at 2 p.m. CT. Big Ten TournamentAll 12 conference teams travel to Evanston, Ill., for the 2014 Big Ten Women's Tennis Tournament. The tournament, hosted by Northwestern University, will begin on Thursday and conclude with the championship match on Sunday.

The Last Meeting

Minnesota

4

Wisconsin

3

March 2, 2014
Madison, Wis.

Gophers Edge Badgers on the Road
Minnesota defeated Big Ten rival Wisconsin, 4-3, in Madison, Wis. Sunday to improve to 9-3 on the season with a 1-0 Big Ten mark.

Matches begin at 10 a.m. CT on Thursday with eighth-seeded Michigan State taking on ninth-seeded Iowa and fifth-seeded Illinois going against 12th-seeded Nebraska. At 2 p.m., seventh-seeded Indiana will square off with 10th-seeded Penn State and sixth-seeded Minnesota will battle 11th-seeded Wisconsin.

Friday's quarterfinals will begin at 10 a.m., with top-seeded Michigan facing the winner of Michigan State-Iowa and fourth-seeded Purdue taking on the winner of Illinois-Nebraska. Second-seeded Northwestern will take on Indiana or Penn State, while third-seeded Ohio State will face the winner of Minnesota-Wisconsin at 2 p.m.

About Minnesota The Gophers, who went 10-16 in Chuck Merzbacher's first season as the Gophers' head coach in 2013, improved to 16-8 in 2013, upped their regular-season win total to 16 in 2014. The 16-win total is the team's highest in a regular season since 2003--the last time the Gopher won more than 16 matches before conference tournament play was in 1988 when it had 18.

Minnesota has been led by Tereza Brichacova and Natallia Pintusava, who have each posted 11 wins at the top two positions. Julia Courter, Aria Lambert, Jessika Mozia, and Paul Rincon Otero have also reached double digit wins--Courter and Lambert have 16 apiece. In double, the Gophers have had 40 wins after going 32-32 in doubles last year. Courter and Pintusava have combined to go 17-4, primarily at the No. 2 position.

About WisconsinWisconsin, which played Minnesota closely despite only having five available players in the teams' first meeting, enters the Big Ten tournament with a 7-12 record that includes a 2-9 conference ledger. UW's two Big Ten wins came against then-No. 65 Iowa and Nebraska.

Lauren Chypyha has been the team's go-to player at No. 1 singles, posting a 14-5 record at the position. She is 2-7 at the top doubles spot with partner Lauren Burich.

Against the BadgersThe Gophers trail the all-time series against Wisconsin 38-17, but defeated an undermanned Badgers squad March 2 in Madison, Wis. back on March 2 in the teams' first Big Ten match. The Gophers also topped UW in 2012 in Minneapolis.

Match Format Experiment OverThe experimental scoring format using to begin the college tennis season has reverted back to the old system as of Feb. 10 for the women. Going forward, there will be three doubles matches are played to eight-game pro-sets and the team winning at least two of the matches gets one team point. If the pro-set is tied 7-7, a seven-point tiebreaker is played.

Six singles matches are then played and each are worth one team point. The matches are best-of-three sets with tiebreakers played to seven points if the set is tied 6-6. Once a team has reached four team points, it has clinched the team victory. The remaining matches are completed with a 10-point match tiebreaker played in place of a third set.